Page 1 of When Sorrows Come

one

April 11th, 2015

When sorrows come, they come not single spies,

But in battalions.

—William Shakespeare,Hamlet.

If six months ago,you’d told me I would be the one to bring Oberon, King of all Faerie, home from his long exile, I would have laughed in your face. If you’d gone on to tell me I was going to declare myself a Torquill in all but blood, formally emancipate myself from my mother’s line of descent, stand witness to a marriage which technically made Dianda Lorden my stepmother, and still be expected to spend time worrying about my wedding, I would have looked at you like you’d just grown a second head. Or possibly a third one.

Then again, if you’d tried to warn me I was even going to need to be concerned about any of those things happening—up to and including the wedding—I would have looked at you the same way. My life does not lend itself well to prognostication.

Thankfully for my ability to get out of bed in the evening, my sister-slash-Fetch, May, and my best friend, Stacy, figured out early on that I have slightly less than no idea what I’m doing when it comes to weddings. And because Stacy was the first person in my group of changeling hooligans to get married—only person so far, since Kerry prefers the “love ’em and leave ’em” model of relationship, and Julie’s most recent serious boyfriend died—she was more than happy to step in and take over. May hasn’t beenmarried yet, although I expect her to propose to her live-in girlfriend, Jazz, as soon as I get my own marriage out of the way, but as a Fetch, her memory goes back much, much longer than a normal person’s, and she remembers having been married at least a dozen times, as both the bride and groom.

Sometimes I think being May must be deeply confusing. And then I remember that being me is deeply confusing, and amend that to “being a person” is deeply confusing, and move on.

Anyway, between them, May and Stacy had seized control of all but the smallest details of the ceremony and were happily adrift in a sea of complicated plans and traditions I neither understood nor actually cared to understand. As long as they were willing to work with Tybalt on the parts he had strong opinions about, and I wound up married at the end of this, I was content.

All the parties involved seemed to find my inability to care about my own wedding somehow weird. I’d like to know when, precisely, I have done anything normally in my life. Most changelings can’t even manage to get knighted, thanks to pureblood prejudices against anyone with a drop of mortal blood in our veins. Me, I got knighted, got counted—there’s probably a better way of saying “was made a Countess and given a knowe of my own,” but I don’t know it—gave up the greater title in favor of returning to simple knighthood, became a Hero of the Realm, and somehow got engaged to a King of Cats while all that was going on. Weird is what we do around here. Weird is the only way we know how tolive.

My name is October Daye. I’m still a changeling, even if my mortality is thinner than it used to be. I’m one of only two Dóchas Sidhe in the entire world, descended from Amandine the Liar, Firstborn daughter of Oberon and Janet Carter, and I’m the legal daughter of Simon Torquill. Something else has changed in the past six months: during her divorce, at which she was very much not a willing participant, Mom tried to say Simon couldn’t leave her because Oberon was her father and she didn’t want him to go.

Turns oxut the laws of fae divorce don’t care if one of the parties is Firstborn. They only care whether all the children of the parties involved are old enough to declare which bloodline they want to officially be a part of going forward. Since Simon was married to my mother when I was born, he’s considered my father inFaerie, even though my actual father was human, which meant I was able to declare myself a Torquill and sever myself from my mother’s family line forever. So now I’m a descendant of Oberon who’s legally considered a child of Titania, and if that’s not a headache happening in slow motion, I can’t tell you what is.

Mom outing herself as a Firstborn has caused some changes in my life as well. She’d been passing herself off as Daoine Sidhe for centuries, leaving me looking like an underpowered descendent of Titania and not a perfectly normal descendent of Oberon. Not all the changes brought on by Mom’s big announcement have been negative ones, although all of them have been annoying for one reason or another.

Most of the Firstborn have long since removed themselves from casual fae society, although I interact with enough of my aunts on a regular basis that it doesn’t always feel that way to me. I don’t tend to interact with my uncles—the only one of them I’ve met, I murdered. So there’s that. Anyway, having access to one of the Firstborn is something most people, having never actually had it, would consider a good thing. So they want it. Because they’re not particularly smart. And now that they know Mom’s Firstborn, they assume they can somehow get it through me, even though I publicly repudiated her during the divorce.

This has resulted in a lot of “problems” in need of “solving” that, when I arrive at the place the problem supposedly occupies, have magically gone away and been replaced by a formal dinner party which mysteriously has a chair open for my bedraggled changeling ass, and a polite question about whether I have my mother on speed dial.

I have flipped off more nobles in the last six months than in my entire life previous, and that’s saying something. My sister—lucky, awful August—is living Undersea in the Duchy of Saltmist with her father and staying fortunately clear of all the crap. The Undersea has a more pragmatic view of the Firstborn and tends to fight them rather than flirt with them. Probably smarter, in the long run.

One good thing about this development: I had been building a bit of a reputation as a king-breaker, due to a couple of acts of treason that really weren’t entirely my fault, and it’s unfair that people keep acting as if they were. A lot of borders had been closed to me unless Arden Windermere, the Queen in the Mists, got me special permission to travel. That includes the borders with ournearest neighbors: Silences, Painted Sands, and Golden Shore. I promised ages ago to take my squire to Disneyland, and not being allowed to drive through Golden Shore to get to Angels down in Southern California has made that a lot harder than it needed to be.

If monarchs are that much against being overthrown, they shouldn’t do things that would make it seem like a good idea. The rot at the root isn’t the revolution, it’s the ruler who refuses to resign. King-breaking is a symptom of sickness, not the cause.

Anyway, it turns out that being able to travel freely because my mother’s a terrible person is helpful with the whole “getting married” thing, since the High King of the Westlands, Aethlin Sollys, has claimed the right to host the wedding party. The only problem was that he’s in Toronto, which isseveralKingdoms away from California. Like, probably a dozen, even if we charted the route that crossed the fewest borders possible. Without Mom’s selfish revelation, getting to my own wedding might have been impossible unless the High King wanted to make a royal decree—something he tries to avoid as much as he can, not wanting to offend the kings and queens serving under him. Part of avoiding king-breakers is, again, being smart enough to not encourage their development.

Luckily, with no one wanting to offend my mother by banning me from their demesne these days, I was finally in a position to draw a straight line across the continent, heedless of whose boundaries ended where. It was a heady change, and I would probably have been pushing Tybalt to let me upgrade our Disneyland trip to DisneyWorldif I hadn’t been afraid he’d kill me for skipping out on having a proper honeymoon with just the two of us.

Finding out that I was allowed to travel again was enough to kick wedding prep, which had been ongoing at a slow, almost stately pace for quite some time, into high gear. I think everyone who actually knew me was afraid I’d do something or overthrow someone and get myself put back on home kingdom arrest before the wedding could take place. I couldn’t entirely blame them for that. The more surprise dinner parties I get ambushed with, the more tempting it became to stab somebody who probably didn’t entirely deserve it but was getting on my nerves enough to make it feel like a good idea at the time.

As I’ve already established, most steps in the planning process were taken out of my hands by the people smart enough to knowthat I cannot be trusted with an entire wedding, especially not my own. There were still a few decisions that needed my input, although none of them involved either the dress or the flowers, two things I was reasonably sure were usually the bride’s responsibility. Tybalt was handling both, and questions about what he intended to do had a tendency to either result in Shakespearean profanity or actual feline hissing. My fiancé is Cait Sidhe, but he’s normally better about keeping that from influencing his behavior.

Not that I minded. Honestly, it was kind of cute. It made me feel... it’s difficult to explain how it made me feel when Tybalt relaxed enough in my presence to let his more animal traits show through. The first time I heard him purr, I thought I might die of joy on the spot.

Faerie isn’t always the kindest place to live and, from what I understand, it never has been. We’re all descendants of the same Three, but somewhere along the line we went from treating one another like one big family to making war whenever possible, setting up artificial hierarchies to determine who was better or more important than who. I’m not complaining about the fact that we figured out there were too many of us to all live like siblings—it would have made dating complicated, and marriage basically impossible—but there’s literally no reason for any kind of fae to behave as if they’re somehow better than any other. All our streams run from the same source, as it were.

There was a time, before Oberon’s original disappearance—an event which fractured Faerie for centuries, and is still fracturing Faerie today, thanks to his continued refusal to tell anyone that he’s back—when changelings were rare and almost feared. Sometimes the blending of fae and human blood can lead to people called merlins, mortal beings who can tap into immensely powerful faerie magic without any of the costs or limitations faced by true fae. There was a war. The purebloods lost. After that, they were a lot less inclined to go stepping out with the local human population, wanting to avoid another merlin uprising. And in the absence of changelings, they’d needed to find something else to hate.

I wasn’t there, obviously. I was born in the 1950s, not the 1500s. But Tybalt is older than I am, and he remembers those days all too vividly. Without changelings, the other purebloods had turned a lot of their prejudices and smug judgments on the members of thefae community who carried clearly animal attributes—including the Cait Sidhe. They’re still viewed as savage and uncouth even today, when there are changelings all over the place. Tybalt learned to suppress his feline side in order to be respected and treated like the king he is. Watching him learn that I wouldn’t judge him when he let himself relax has been a joy and a gift that I’m grateful for every single night.

I’ll be even more grateful when his adopted nephew, Raj, comes of age and is able to formally claim the throne of the local Court of Cats. Until that happens, Tybalt is technically still King of Dreaming Cats, his crown held in stewardship by Ginevra, a Princess of Cats and daughter of the King of Whispering Cats in Silences. His loyalties will remain at least partially divided between me and his people until Raj is mature enough to challenge him and win.

I honestly think Raj would win if he challenged Tybalt tomorrow; Tybalt would go easy on him, out of love and concern and the need to be rid of his position, and it would undermine Raj’s entire rule. Raj knows it, too. That’s why neither of them is pushing for the challenge to happen any faster than it needs to.

At least with Raj and his regent holding the Court, Tybalt has been freed to functionally move into my house. Even better, despite being older than the United States of America, which is something I do my best not to dwell on more than absolutely necessary, Tybalt doesn’t hold with any of that puritanical human nonsense about a bride needing to be “pure” on her wedding day. Not that that ship hadn’t sailedlongbefore he proposed to me—and long before he and I were anything but enemies. I have a teenage daughter, Gillian, who lives with the Roane in Half Moon Bay, trying to figure out her place in Faerie without the specter of her deadbeat mother-turned-hero of the realm hanging over her.

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